I Am Duran

by Roberto Duran

  Then came the snow. On fight night, the Atlantic City area got twenty-seven inches. It had been Fula’s birthday the day before and she’d taken the kids to the boardwalk to relax, but on the way back to the hotel they got caught in a snowstorm and had to take shelter for a while in the lobby of another hotel. When they made it back to Trump Plaza, it was very emotional in the dressing room. Donald Trump came in to say hi to me. My kids were nervous, watching me get my hands wrapped. And Robin wasn’t the only one with doubts. Chavo was thinking of how Barkley had destroyed Hearns and Hearns had destroyed his dad, and he’d seen for himself how tall and strong Barkley was. He never told me this until later—didn’t want to undermine my confidence.

  Then a guy knocks on the door and says, “Durán, you’re next.” I was always moody and sullen before fights. This time, I was pissed off, too—but at the same time, completely relaxed, almost in a trance, as I kept repeating the same mantras:

  Barkley does not belong in the same ring with me.

  I am not washed up.

  I am not the underdog.

  “Why are you guys nervous?” I said to the room. “What’s going on? Who’s gonna die? Relax.”

  I was down to 156 pounds and I was confident as hell. That piece of shit wasn’t going to beat me. I pissed a bunch of times on the dressing room carpet to lose a bit more. As usual, Plomo put some grease on my body that stank like hell, and when he’d finished, I started to shadowbox. Later de Cubas would say I got younger every minute the fight drew closer—he said I looked like the Durán who had fought against Davey Moore. “You are going to beat that son of a bitch, Durán!” he yelled.

  Arum had put all the Olympians on the card that night, including Michael Carbajal, Anthony Hembrick, and the heavyweight Ray Mercer, as I recall. It was another sellout crowd at the Convention Center, with 7,500 fans screaming for the fight to start. Barkley had to lose a lot of weight, too, and looked lean and pumped. It was his first defense of the middleweight title. I got into the ring with de Cubas and Mike Acri and told them, “Me voy a los palos con este negro.” I am going toe to toe with this black guy.

  As soon as the bell rang, I got in a shot to the head with my right and then I backed off, cautious. I could have knocked him out within two or three rounds after hurting him like that, but I was a little afraid I was going to run out of air and I needed to hold him at bay. “If I get tired,” I thought, “this guy is going to come after me like a hurricane.” So I changed the plan of attack. I never let his jab get to me and at the same time I eliminated his most powerful weapon, his right hand.

  I went back to the corner after that first round and started thinking. In one minute, you have to think of everything. I told Plomo I was going to box him, not go for a quick knockout, and that’s what I did. He tried to jab me, but I kept blocking it and countered. I was more patient than I’d been in any other fight, spending the first six rounds just waiting for the right opportunity to launch into him. Meanwhile, he kept coming at me with some heavy body shots, but they didn’t do any serious damage.

  In the eighth round I got badly hit with a hook I didn’t see coming. I was off balance, so he spun me around, which made it look much worse than it was. I came back to win the ninth and tenth rounds, hitting him with some bombs.

  And then Barkley comes out hurt in the eleventh. Something must have happened that I hadn’t clocked, because he was desperate. He was going to try to kill me or I was going to kill him and we were going at each other like crazy until the final minute of the round, when I caught him with a big right lead—bam! He was hurt. For good measure, I followed it up with a left-left-right combination—boom! With thirty seconds to go in the round, I kept coming hard at him, going for the kill. I hit him with an overhand right, a hook, a right to the ear, another hook, and a cross. Buenas noches. Good night. Barkley is down and everyone is going crazy.

  But my wife doesn’t know what’s going on—once again, she’s too scared to watch. She’s on the phone to Panama, talking to her mother. “Mama, how’s the fight going? Are they hitting him? Is he winning? Is he losing?”

  “For God’s sake, Fula, you’re at the stadium—watch the fight!”

  “Who’s winning? Who’s winning?”

  “He knocked him down!”

  “Who knocked who down? Is Roberto okay?”

  “He knocked down Barkley!”

  Joe Cortez, the referee, starts counting. “One, two, three . . .” Finally, Barkley is up at seven, but he’s finished. He doesn’t even know what corner he’s supposed to go back to at the end of the round. What you don’t see on the TV replay is that I saw him wobbling and jumped up in the air to hit him as hard as I could to make sure he went down. He managed to stay up in the twelfth, but I knew I had him. I bounced up and down, looking at him. He was beaten. What I told de Cubas was true: Yo voy a descojonar este negro. I’m going to tear this black guy’s balls off.

  I won a split decision, even though one of the judges, incredibly, had Barkley winning, and there it was. I was a champion again. Un campeón. Only the third fighter—and the first Latin—to capture major titles in four weight classes. The Ring magazine would name it “Fight of the Year.” Everyone had seen it as a thirty-seven-year-old man fighting against a monster, but I remember a reporter asking me in the ring after the fight, “Roberto, your heart and determination is incredible. Where does it come from?”

  “Panama City,” I told him. “Republic of Panama. I love Panama. I love Miami. I love United States.” When I was inspired by my country, you could not beat me. You had to kill me.

  Donald Trump came into the dressing room and invited me to a post-fight party he was hosting, but I respectfully declined. When I came up to my hotel room, they filled the hot tub with ice and champagne, and the kids were carrying the championship belt around. I made $325,000 from that fight, and I deserved more, but right then it wasn’t important: I was a world champion again—that was the only thing that mattered.

  In Panama, people went crazy. There were firecrackers exploding across Panama City, and honking cars filled with people waving Panamanian flags, all heading to my house, where they lined up in front of the marble fountains, chanting my name. Someone told me the president had a plane waiting for me to go back to Panama. “No,” I told them. “I’m going to Victor’s Café. And then I’m going to Miami.” I wanted this party to be the biggest and longest. I dedicated the fight to all the Cubans in Panama and Miami because the Panamanians had treated me so badly.

  “You know, Durán, I love you and so do the Cuban people,” Victor said to me in New York, “but remember you have your country.”

  “What am I going to do there?”

  “If you want, I will go with you, Durán. I wish I had a country that was free I could go back to. Please promise me that when Cuba is free, you will come with me to Cuba.”

  “Of course.”

  A couple of days later we arrived back in Panama, while Victor stayed in New York. There were carnivals and parties all over the place, especially at my home. I was on top again, and all the manzanillos were tripping over one another trying to become my favorite. They would fight among themselves like scavengers to get closest to the pot of gold—plied me with everything they could think of, including women. They were brazen about it, too, showing up at our parties with whores. Fula obviously noticed, but they didn’t seem to care. She’d throw whatever she could find at the manzanillos—glasses, plates, once even a great big chain—screaming, “Get those whores out of my house!”

  Around that time, I took a party boat to Taboga, an island about twelve miles from Panama City, where I’d rented five rooms to hang out in and party. The boat accommodated only eight people, but we squeezed about twenty in—me, the manzanillos, women. Somehow, Fula got wind that I was with La China, my mistress at the time. So she decided to pay me a surprise visit. She told my kids and some cousins that they were going
to the beach. The kids got all excited. But Fula had no intention of going to the beach. She was wearing a scarf, sunglasses, and a hat so people on the boat would not recognize her. When they got to the hotel, she told the kids to play with their Nintendos while she went downstairs for a moment.

  Then she confronted me, La China, and the manzanillos in the bar. My mistress tried to leave, but Fula told her to sit down, staring at us, and made as if she had a gun in her purse—I’d given her a small pistol as a present not long before.

  “Fula, don’t do it!” I kept pleading.

  “All it takes is one shot,” she said. “One shot . . .”

  Fortunately, nothing happened, and at the end of the day the manzanillos and my mistress had to go back to Panama City on the ferry. I went back on my boat with Fula and the kids as if nothing had happened.

  That was our life. Complicated, as always. My wife tugging on one sleeve, the manzanillos on the other, and then there was the rest of my family . . .

  One night, Pototo got into a fight, and I had to come to his rescue. Somebody had called the riot squad, and my brother and some other men were arrested for disorderly conduct. Fortunately for him, I got there before they took him to jail. As soon as the guards spotted me, they changed their tune, asking me for autographs and posing for pictures, but most important, the charges against Pototo were dropped.

  But I still kept true to myself: beneath all the craziness that went on in my life since I’d become famous, I was really the same I always had been. I remember one particular day it was pouring down rain and I was wearing one of the expensive pairs of shoes I’d bought from Luis Gardini in New York all those years ago, which had cost me between $750 and $900. I ran into an old friend of mine, a broadcaster for baseball games, who stopped and stared at my shoes.

  “Damn, Durán, those shoes are beautiful,” he said. “You look sharp in those! Can I have them?”

  “Take them,” I said, and took them off.

  “But it’s raining.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” My socks got soaked, but I couldn’t have cared less. I was probably happier to have gotten rid of them, and I went straight to a nightclub like that. I like to make people happy, and I’d rather have friends than enemies.

  That includes my opponents. Men like the very first man to beat me, who came back into my life that year for unexpected reasons. In April 1989, a friend got in touch: “Durán, I want you to go see Esteban de Jesús. He’s dying of AIDS—he could go at any minute. It would mean a lot to him.” I didn’t hesitate, and along with Giovanni and Wiwa, I took my daughter Jovanna, who was fourteen.

  De Jesús had gone downhill in a big way since we last fought in 1978. I heard he’d gotten very depressed after losing that fight and started smoking marijuana, snorting cocaine, and doing “speedballs” of cocaine and heroin. Then, in 1980, he shot someone in the head and was given a life sentence for first-degree murder. After his brother Enrique died of AIDS in 1985, Esteban tested positive, too; it turned out that the brothers had been sharing needles. The governor of Puerto Rico had agreed he could be released to get treatment, and now he was in a hospital that was more like a drug treatment facility, in an abandoned milk factory in Río Piedras. “I’m waiting to see what’s to be God’s will,” I’d seen him saying in a TV interview. “I’m in God’s hands.”

  When I set eyes on him, I felt so sorry for him. He was so skinny and frail and must have weighed less than a hundred pounds. The last time I’d seen him, he’d looked like a weight lifter—he’d been such a strong, muscular man. Now his speech was slurred, his eyes were watery, and he was out of it.

  I leaned over to hug him but realized I might hurt him if I hugged him too tightly, so then I kissed him on the forehead. “Tu siempre vas a ser mi campeón,” I told him. You will always be my champion. José Torres, the former Puerto Rican fighter, was there, too, and took a picture of me hugging de Jesús that became quite famous. Jovanna was by the door, terrified at the thought of catching AIDS if she touched him. People didn’t know as much about the disease back then. But I called her over and she hugged Esteban as well.

  When he came around from the drugs he was on, we talked for a bit. He was barely conscious, but he knew who I was. And then we said good-bye, knowing we would never see each other again. Within a week, he was dead. He was thirty-seven—such a waste of a brilliant talent.

  I earned a lot of respect for what I did, especially from the Puerto Ricans, even though that wasn’t why I did it. I just wanted to be respectful and honor him, because we were no longer rivals, and I wanted him to die without pain. May he rest in peace.

  NINE

  “UNO MÁS”

  I NEEDED TO MAKE PEACE AS WELL, but with myself. Leonard had yet to agree to take me on for the third time, which was a fight I’d earned nine years before when I’d beaten the odds and won the first encounter with him. What I didn’t find out until much later was that Leonard was still upset about that fight, even though he’d beaten me since. He couldn’t handle it that everyone was still talking about me and felt I hadn’t paid him enough respect after he had beaten me. I’d been waiting almost a decade: we were 1–1, and it was logical to fight for a third time. But every time the subject came up Leonard would say, “I want to fight you, but you have to fight at 162 pounds.”

  “Why do I have to fight at 162 pounds if you are champion at 168?”

  “I won’t fight, then.”

  After I beat Barkley, de Cubas and Acri started negotiating with Bob Arum. They said they had a deal done with Shelly Finkel, who was promoting Leonard, to fight him for $12.5 million, but after Leonard and Hearns fought to a draw the deal blew up, because many people thought Leonard had lost. Now Arum offered me $7.5 million, which pissed me off: that third fight should have been my biggest payday. It was all a mess, and the delays only added to my feeling that Leonard was still afraid of me, particularly fighting at 168 pounds, which was now my normal fighting weight.

  Chuleta. I was going to lose millions—a guaranteed purse of $7.5 million—if I didn’t fight at the weight that suited Leonard. What made matters worse was that I’d just discovered I had a major problem with the IRS: an accounting error had meant I hadn’t paid my taxes after the second fight with Leonard. I couldn’t believe it. “I don’t owe anyone anything,” I said. I had trusted people to look after this shit for me; it wasn’t my job to deal with the paperwork, it was my job to fight. I was being told only now, just when I’d spent pretty much all the money I had. Everyone was blaming everyone else and saying it was my fault that I didn’t care enough about it. So I didn’t have much choice. To pay my taxes, I had to fight Leonard at 162 pounds.

  It got worse. Because I couldn’t read English, I didn’t know until after I’d signed the contract that it said that I’d forfeit $1 million for each pound I was overweight. Damn them! But in the end, I did make weight, and the guy who struggled was Leonard, who came in at 160 to my 158.

  The date was to be December 7, 1989, at the Mirage in Las Vegas. Predictably, the slogan the promoters came up with was “Uno más.”

  So Leonard and I were to be rivals again, not only face-to-face in the ring but as adversaries from countries that didn’t like each other. The run-up to the fight was not a good time for my country politically. The United States wanted to overthrow General Manuel Noriega, who’d already been indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges. They were accusing him of suppressing democracy and endangering U.S. nationals, and to put pressure on him, they imposed economic sanctions. In October 1989, the United States supported a coup to try to oust him. It didn’t work, but the Americans kept trying to squeeze him out and that made all of us Panamanians mad. People were looking for any excuse to get one over on America, and I didn’t need a second invitation. “For Panama, I’m going to beat this loudmouth,” I said in a TV advertisement that aired in my country. I also told them to be smart and bet on me.<
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  By now, there wasn’t the same hatred between me and Leonard there had been in the past; so much time had gone by, and so much had happened to both of us. We got along well—I was drinking champagne with him and his brother before the fight—but in public we had to keep up the rivalry because of the tension between our two countries.

  Giant screens were being set up in the neighborhoods back home so the people of Panama could watch me fight. At the same time, the media was warning people to be on the alert, since this would be the best opportunity for another invasion by the U.S. forces. But many of the estimated 12,000 American soldiers stationed in Panama were going to be rooting for Leonard. There was a popular souvenir of a baseball cap with my name on it and four embroidered boxing titles. I told reporters I was going to add a fifth. For once, Fula decided she was going to be ringside, along with my mother—one of the rare occasions she left Panama to see me fight.

  Of all the fights I have had in my career, this was the strangest. I felt exhausted before I even got in the ring. As I was leaving the dressing room, I said to de Cubas, “I can’t feel my hands. They wrapped them too tightly.” That was the first mistake my corner made. I also hadn’t factored in the temperature: the cold was terrible that night—down in the forties—and I came into the ring in a silk robe. It looked great, with my name embroidered on the back, but I was freezing cold underneath, with the sweat coming off me from the warm-up in the dressing room. By contrast, Leonard came out in a full-length parka, and his corner put a blanket over him between rounds. In my corner, Carlos Hubbard and Plomo stuck to what we knew and put ice on me, as usual.

  I didn’t realize it until I was in the ring, but I could tell that my eyesight wasn’t the same, that I couldn’t see the punches coming; and while Leonard spent most of the night boxing and running, and I beat him up badly, I wasn’t used to this feeling of not being able to see where the next punch was coming from. I had no regrets about my life out of the ring, but for the first time I could feel that my age had caught up with me. My legs were heavy, and no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t dance.